Sunday, June 24, 2012

My text is
a Thomason tract. Only ‘…ber’ for the month appears in his title page dating,
it was perhaps September, certainly the 20th of the relevant month.

A most
faithful relation of two wonderful passages which happened very lately (to wit,
on the first and eighth days of this present September, being Lords days) in
the parish of Bradfield in Berk-shire1650.

The London writer
has a preamble, in which the millenarian hopes entertained by Dr John Pordage
and his wife are represented as (inevitably) the devil’s work prospering in
Berkshire, just as they are prospering everywhere as never before:

“This is an
Age of wonders: for I dare affirme, that since the deplorable Fall of our first
Parents, at which time Sin was first ushered into the World, the ill spirit was
never so busie, he never made such a harvest, or had such a latitude of power
given him to ramble up and down in any part of the earth, as he hath had lately
in this island; witness else in what various forms he hath appeared, and what
sundry feats he hath played in Essex, Suffolk, Cambridge-shire, and other
places, especially in Scotland, where thousands have been possest by him, and
so brought to the Gallows: And now it seems he hath taken footing in Berk-shire,
as appears by these two uncouth Examples following.”

The writer
renders Pordage’s name as ‘Doctor Pordich’ (making me wonder how often you
would give, in those spelling-permissive days, a subtly denigratory spelling to
a person’s name – ‘poor ditch’). John Pordage, as his ODNB life makes clear, was only just holding on in the regular
church. The ‘Commissioners
for ejecting of Scandalous Ministers’ would finally oust him in 1655. Pordage seems to have been involved or interested
in the Family of Love, was prone to denunciations of marriage, was accused of
denying the Trinity, was a Behmenist; while the ‘Everet’ named here as the
likely ‘conjurer’ who has directed the devil to make these possessions in
Berkshire, was actually John Everard - Leveller, Grindletonian, alchemist, etc,
etc.

So, what
would be represented as diabolic intrusion into parish life in Berkshire was
really product of Pordage’s earnest and ecstatic belief that the heavens were
about to open. Marvellously, he was in his pulpit preaching when it became
somehow apparent to him that the big moment had come, and he exited his church
then and there, anxious to get back to where the real action was going to be:

“Doctor Pordich being preaching in the
Parish-Church of Bradfield (on the
eighth of this instant September,
being Lords day) within a quarter of an hour he fell into a Trance, running out
of the Church, and bellowing like a Bull, saying that he was called, and must
be gone.”

In its
small way, it is a moment with something of the significance of the famous time
when Mohammed turned his followers round during worship, away from Jerusalem,
and towards Mecca. The Vicar of Bradfield exits his church, to be translated
into heaven from home, along with his true followers - his wife, and some of
their female friends. In his case, it proved not to be so epochal.

Understandably,
when he left his church at such a moment in such a state, Pordage was pursued
and questioned, but only replied that he must be gone ‘home to his house’.
Fortunately, William Foster (a local gentleman rich enough to own a coach)
followed Pordage home and witnessed what happened when the vicar got home:

“Where
being come, he going up the Stairs, found his Wife, (Mistress Pordich) Clothed all in White Lawne,
from the crown of the head, to the sole of the foot, with a White Rod in her
hand.”

What’s
pleasing about all this is that the apocalypse seems to be egalitarian in
regards to gender. Now Pordage had heterodox views about marriage, and
ambiguous relations with a number of women. He probably regarded his women followers
as being in a state higher than marriage anyway. But at this moment, his wife (in
the eyes of the normal world) Mistress Pordage, is garbed as a prophetess, and
will soon call for ‘Elijah’s mantle’. Female followers gather: “Mistress Chevill coming in fell on her knees,
saying, That she was to meet with her Spouse, and her Prophetess. After this
comes in Mistress Tracie, holding of
her head, and making of strange noyses, that were heard within her, in a very
hideous passion. After this they fell all to dancing the Hays, about three
flower-pots…”

Mr Foster, who
has followed from church, asks Pordage what is meant by the dancing, and learns
that “It was a rejoicing, because they
had overcome the Devil.” Of course, joy that you have vanquished Satan in
Berkshire can easily be represented in London as Satan’s victory over you.
Perhaps there is a Familist touch in Mistress Chevill arriving to meet ‘her
Spouse’ – Christ? Pordage? Though being the man he was, Pordage was inclined to
deny that there was very much significant difference.

“With that
his Wife cries out for Elijah’s
Mantle, and then comes up Mistress Chevill,
and Mistress Pordich fell of adoring
her; and then in came one Goodwife Pukerig,
and bended her body, and kissed her knee; Mistress Pordich assuring her that there was a place prepared for her in
heaven, to sit at the right hand of the Virgin Mary.”

‘Elijah’s
mantle’ because of the second book of Kings, verse 11: “And it came to pass, as they still went
on, and talked, that, behold, there appeared a chariot of fire, and horses of
fire, and parted them both asunder; and Elijah went up by a whirlwind into
heaven.” Mistress Pordage is ready to ascend to heaven without death, as
happened to Elijah. (“Knowest thou that theLordwill take away thy master from thy
head to day?”)

But, as usual
with these moments when the rapture is about to commence, there’s a snag –
someone is missing, and it seems that this someone, who perhaps was important
in making up the right numbers, was Foster’s own wife. Foster, having seen
enough, leaves, but is urgently sent after and asked to return, bringing his
wife with him. With her
husband very much awake to strange goings-on, Foster’s wife gets cold feet, and
simply refuses to go. In his 1655 publication, Innocencieappearing, through the darkmistsofpretendedguilt, Pordage over-confidently (and very conveniently) cites all
the charges that were made against him, and in that work, it sounds as though
Mistress Foster was rather frightened by the thought of seeing the heavens
opened, as had been promised. As for Foster himself, he was probably involved at some lesser level himself. His
wife having refused to answer the summons to be present at this Pang Valley
ascension into heaven, Foster “tooke his Coach, and went alone: so coming into
the Doctors house, he found the Doctor sitting in a Chaire all in black Velvet.”
Costumes, as ever with early modern culture, were important for the show – as
prophetess, Mistress Pordage has head to foot white linen, and her husband,
black velvet (costly material and dye!). The mantle of Elijah itself was
probably still in a wardrobe waiting to be deployed.

Asked where
his wife is, Foster says she is not well, and therefore she cannot come: “Then
said the Doctor, there is nothing can be done without her.” Crisis indeed!
Mistress Pordage also asks the coachman, and hears confirmation that it is all
going wrong. But they seem to have endeavoured to prolong the celestial window
of opportunity, perhaps in hope that Mistress Foster would relent and show up
just in time: “So there they keep dancing of the Hayes, and Trenchmore, and
expecting when they shall be taken up to heaven every hour.”

The writer
concludes with a dark imputation – Everard, as witch, was directing all this
from far away: “By what means this Distraction came, is not as yet certainly
known; but it is thought it was done by one Everet (a man suspected to be a
Sorcerer or Witch) who much-frequented the Doctors house, and would often play
with the children; and he was seen at London in a frantick posture, much about
the time that these things happened.”

The little
tract has ‘two wonderful passages’, however. Out of a sense of social status, the
London writer has told the story of
Doctor Pordage’s folly first. He then moves on to detail what had happened the
week before in the very same parish church. As this had happened to a thirteen
year old youth, an illiterate member of a poor man’s large family (well,
illiterate for the moment, but that all would change), it became the secondary
story. The writer has relegated the one of the local signs that probably
triggered Pordage to announce the apocalypse from its proper chronological
place. Something of this sort would
happen in Pordage’s church: on Sept 1st, a youth of 13, “son to one
Goodman Snelling”, “being in the
Parish-Church of Bradfield, fell into a very strange Fit, foaming at the mouth
for the space of two hours.”

Now to fall
into a fit and foam at the mouth seems to me a very likely reaction to one of
John Pordage’s sermons – he seems to have been a preacher worth hearing, wildly
unpredictable, charismatic, full of novel doctrines, and easily misunderstood.
The youth, whose sanity has probably been affected by listening to Pordage
preach every Sunday, finally emerges
from his fit, and announces that he must go to London, taking his father with
him. In London, they will find an old man there “living without Temple-bar, and
said to be a Gold-smith”) who was “possest with two devils, and had the Root of
Corruption in him.”

Exactly
what you’d want to visit London to do – to locate the root of corruption. One
can perhaps sense Pordage’s influence here, and a touching willingness on
behalf of his young parishioner to come up with some marvel to interest his
raving vicar. Exactly as foretold, they do indeed find the old man, who has
been lying in a trance, from which he revives at the very instant that they
arrive. This mysterious personage gives them yet more bewildering instructions:
they are to go to Beacon Hill (it is just south of Newbury, close to Highclere
house, aka Downton Abbey), “and there he should finde, at such a place, a
crooked stick lying on the ground, and in it there should be an Inkhorn and a
pen, and directions how to write and read, and to speak several Languages, and
by the stick should be lying a lamb.”

The
eagerness to attain literacy, by hook or by crook, is commendable. Off they
trudge out to the west. Arrived at the hill, first of all they see the lamb, then
they find the crooked stick, and “therein an Inkhorn and pen: and the boy
taking up the stick, the Lamb vanished.” Then the visionary experiences start:
they hear “strange voices in the air; and they saw the King with his head off,
and then again they saw him with his head on, and a Crown upon it: also they saw
Wallingford on fire, and the Governours
head off.”

Emotional
perturbation indeed, a perfect 17th century mixture of political and
religious anxieties: the King, a troubling beheaded phantom, and then re-headed.
Heaven’s anger striking Wallingford (which had been the last royalist
stronghold to hold out in 1646, but finally failed the king’s cause) and its
Parliamentarian governor (Colonel Arthur Evelyn, it would have been). The
father and son take the bad news to Wallingford, and seem to have been received
in a level-headed way: “Whereupon, this Goodman Snelling and his son went to
the Governour of Wallingford, and told him of it; who answered, that he hoped
no such thing would come to pass.”

No great
outcome at Wallingford, which would not burn down till 1675, and they are left
with the suddenly literate younger Snelling, who also does his best to manifest
the languages he has supernaturally acquired:

“This
Goodman Snelling hath a great family, and they are all in a very strange
frantick condition. he is a pot-ash-maker; and when his Fit is over, he is as
sensible as any one; and he hath told his neighbours that he would give all
that he has in the world, so that he were free of this business. And he saith
that his son did bring him to such a hill, as right as though he had been there
a thousand times before. And the boy can now write very well, which before he
could not. Also, there are strange confused sound of Languages heard within
him, but he does not speak them distinctly.”

Our writer
concludes: “These things are certainly true, and avouched by a cloud of
witnesses, young and old, who are the people of the best reputation in that
County. My Conclusion shall be with this short prayer, which never was more
seasonable then now: God deliver us from
the Devil and all his shifts.”

As I said,
Pordage somehow kept his job in the church until he was ejected in 1655 after
hearings in1654. There’s nothing at the church in Bradfield that remains from
his time: the Victorians made a thoroughgoing and very heavy-handed restoration
of the building in 1848.

Pordage
himself features pricelessly in A Collection of modern relations of matter
of fact concerning witches & witchcraft upon the persons of people (1693), which has an account of the quite
staggering manifestations taking place in the Pordage’s house in 1649. The fun here
is that it starts as Pordage’s defence of himself from charges of conjuration.
He too takes the line that Satan is empowered as never before:

“How then canBradfield,or any other Place, be exempted from
his Appearing when God permits? And may not all this be for the manifesting of
his Glory, Goodness and Power? And who can tell whose Family may be next
exposed by God’s permission, to be tryed and proved by the Representation ofSatan?And I desire you seriously to consider
how any such Apparitions raised by the Devil, and permitted by God for his own
Glory, argue me either Ignorant, Scandalous, or Insufficient …”

But, whenever he
was in a hole, which (unsurprisingly in view of his beliefs), was often, and
seriously, Pordage could not resist enlarging and improving the hole to suit his
own fancy. He can’t hold back from telling how, yes, the spirit of Everard
appeared nocturnally in his bedchamber in August 1649, how then he saw a terrifying
giant, then a dragon.

Pordage sounds
off (as was his wont) largely about the different spiritual worlds, and then
produces this undeniably striking witness to the activities of the evil side of
the spirit world: “the Spirits made some wonderfulImpressions upon visible Bodies
without,as Figures of Men
and Beasts upon the Glass Windows and the Ceilings of the House, some of which
yet remain. But what was most remarkable was the whole visible World
represented by the Spirits upon the Bricks of a Chimney, in the form of two
half Globes, as in the Maps. After which, upon other Bricks of the same
Chimney, was Figured a Coach and four Horses, with Persons in it, and a Footman
attending, all seeming to be in Motion, with many other such Images, which were
wonderful exactly done. Now, fearing lest there might be any Danger in these
Images, through unknown Conjuration and false Magic, we endeavoured to wash
them out with wet Cloths, but could not, finding them engraven in the substance
of the Bricks, which indeed might have continued till this day, had not our
fear and suspicion of Witch-craft, and some evil design of the Devil against us
in it, caused us to deface and obliterate them with Hammers.Now, what the Devil’s End in the former
Apparitions, and those figurative Representations was, the
Lord knows: But it was certainly Evil.”

In Innocencieappearing, through the darkmistsofpretendedguilt, Pordage obligingly lists all the charges made against him
locally, and something of the same kind of optical hallucination appears: “in
Dr Pordage’s house in Bradfield, lately the new Jerusalem hath been seen to
come down from heaven, all of precious stones; and in the new Jerusalem was a
Globe, which Globe was eternity”.

I wonder what was
going off. Were these things products of Pordage’s heated imagination? He was
capable of seeing a lot, indeed, seeing infinity, in almost anything, as his
wild commentary on very basic images of circles and dots in Theologia mystica shows. But his house
seems to have become notorious, and to have had all kinds of people turning up
there. Everard was an experimenter: could he have done devised some method of
projecting or etching the pictures?

I cycled over to
what had been his church earlier today. The church as an institution expelled
Pordage, and the over-sized and frowsty Victorian pile, which seems in part to
have been used for services attended by boys from Bradfield College, testifies
to the enduring dull power of that church. Pordage is listed in a manuscript
list of previous incumbents as one who ‘intruded’ on the proper pastoral succession:
Elias Ashmole is down as his patron to the living. The Victorians in their
re-build obliterated any chance of finding a church with a furtive alchemical
emblem or Rosicrucian enigma.

Friday, June 15, 2012

These curious woodcuts derive from and expand on the familiar woodcut
frontispiece to Matthew Hopkins’ The
Discovery of Witches. I found them - among many others - in The
informer’s doom, or, An unseasonable letter from Utopia directed to the man in
the moon giving a full and pleasant account of the arraignment, tryal, and
condemnation of all those grand and bitter enemies that disturb and molest all
kingdoms and states throughout the Christian world (1683),which John Dunton
probably both wrote and published, or maybe just put into print as bookseller
(the former seems more likely). As publisher, Dunton is keen to let his
potential purchasers know what a good deal they are getting: “I have comprized
this Treatise in an Eighteen Penny Book, (though considering the Cuts, it cannot
be well afforded so) that as it is of real use and publick concern, so it might
be the better disperst throughout this English Nation.” The sixty plus
woodcuts – as they are small, derivative, and crude - in a book priced at
eighteen pence might not have been all that much of a bargain.

Whoever wrote The informer’s doom,
he was a keen reader of John Bunyan, whose Pilgrim’s
Progress had appeared five years before. The work closely copies Bunyan’s
very direct allegory, even down to that reluctance some of Bunyan’s allegorical
characters understandably show about disclosing their all too revelatory names.
It is a fantasy of a Utopian England, where “all those grand and bitter
Enemies, that disturb all Kingdoms and States, throughout the Christian World”
(‘the Christian world’ actually means England) can be brought to trial, found
guilty, and (surprise, surprise!) executed. Pope Innocent XI, supreme pontiff
when Dunton was writing, is depicted being burned at the stake, Justice
Implacable (part of Dunton’s long campaign against Judge Jeffreys) gets hanged
himself, Mrs Bad Wife ends up “Carted to the Great Ducking-stool that
is in this Town, and there shall you sit (in the presence of all the women in Utopia
for a warning to them) till you expire out your poysonous and infectious
breath.” A long denunciation of Sir John Fraud, as he appears in all
professions, rounds out the work.

In each allegorical trial, suitable witnesses appear to testify to the guilt
of the accused: “there came into the Court Mr. Witch-finder
General, Mr. Hate-device, and Mr. Spy-Imp, and said,
They could prove all the Prisoners at the Bar guilty of hainous Crimes and
Offences, and that they were real Witches.”

This witchcraft material is part of the final resistance to the middle to late 17th century movement to
deny the existence of witches and their pacts. I have already shown Dunton
retailing a witch yarn in his most successful venture, The Athenian Mercury: http://roy25booth.blogspot.co.uk/2011/07/witch-detected-en-route-for-america.html
Dunton is lining up beside the recently dead Joseph Glanvill, whose Saducismus triumphatus
had appeared in 1681, with a flurry of reprints. But to turn back to
Matthew Hopkins as late as 1683 suggests that Dunton was either a witchcraft
die-hard, shrilly insisting that it all had to be believed, at whatever cost in
hangings, or (perhaps just as likely) that a page-covering motive impelled this
part of the text. No specific witchcraft case is in view, witches in general
are the subject. There are some signs of confusion between the demonic familiar
and the witch. When, finally, a witch named ‘Holt’ is singled out, it seems confusingly
derived from ‘Holt’, a familiar spirit in the form of a ‘white kitling’ in
Hopkins’ Discovery of Witches. There’s
a similar suggestion of confusion in this extract from the allegorical trial: “Mr. Witch-finder General, ‘My Lord,
then first as to Vinegar-Tom, He is a Witch in grain …’

Dunton has his presiding man of law ask an intelligent question about why
spirits should want to suck blood from a witch:

Mr. Attorney General,

Pray Mr Witch-finder, How comes it to pass, that the Devil
being a Spirit (and so consequentially wanting no Nutriment or Sustentation,
should desire to suck any blood; and indeed as he is a Spirit he cannot draw
any excresences, having neither flesh nor bone, and cannot be felt.

Mr. Witchfinder,

He seeks not their blood, as if he could not subsist without
that Nourishment, but he often repairs to them and gets it, the more to
aggravate the Witches Damnation, and to put her in mind of her Covenant

As so often happened in the ruthless speed of a real 17th
century court, a weak-minded accused person is harried into confession: “The
old Hag stands up and
answers for her self, confessing her Imps
Names to the Judge,
and the reason how she come to turn Witch.”

Hag. My Lord, I must confess I am a Witch,
and have several Imps, whose Names are Illemauzer, Pye-wacket,
Peck in the Crown, Griezel Greedigut; but I hope your Lordship will spare
my life.

But Dunton goes on in a more considered fashion, with his
‘Hag’ explaining why she made her pact with the devil:

The reason why some become Witches.
“Because I had never been a Witch had not Poverty come
upon me like an armed man, and that continuing, filled my mind with discontent;
and in that discontented humuor, the Devil striking in, told me, if I would
give up my self to him, I should not want as long as I lived. Oh, pray my Lord,
therefore spare me, spare me, for I had never been a Witch had it not
been for Poverty! Poverty! Poverty! and a discontented mind.”

And likewise beg’d of the Judge that her Life might be spar’d,
adding withal, that if the Judge would forgive her, she would confess
to his Lordship, The Cheats and Delusions the Devil imposeth upon Witches,
and many other remarkable things. When she had done speaking, the Judge
told her, He could not save her life, but if she would make any Confession, he
would not put her to so severe Death as she deserv’d both by the Law of God and
Man.”

Using the invented ‘Holt’ as his mouthpiece, Dunton addresses the much-discussed
issue of the limits of a devil’s power. His version isn’t unprecedented, but he
does at least go into the detail of the devil’s deceptive pretence to power, he
has thought through the whole process. The devil has no power to kill; rather, thousands
of years of observation have made him an excellent physician. When he infers
that a person is about to die, the devil actually promotes an enmity between
the person who will soon die, and the witch he wishes to delude. Once a
quarrel, or fear, has been provoked, the purely natural death of the newly
created opponent is represented to the witch as the devil carrying out her malefice. By this means the devil
simultaneously convinces the witch, and damns her through a metaphysical
version of the legal mens rea.
Here is the whole bizarre edifice of argument, in Dunton’s own invented
exchange:

Holt makes large Confessions of the Wiles of the Devil.

Holt, “My Lord, (to begin then) The Devil
doth (as I now can tell by dreadful experience) often play the Deluder and
Impostor with Witches, in perswading them that they are the cause of such and
such a Murther, and that he hope them in the effecting of it, when indeed neither
he nor they had any hand in it: And he being of long standing, above six
thousand years, must needs be a great Scholar in all knowledges of Arts
and Tongues, and so have the best skill in Physick, judgment
in Physiognomy, and knowledge of what Disease is reigning or
predominant in this or that mans body, (and so for Cattel too) by reason of his
long experience. This subtile Tempter knowing such a man liable to some sudden
disease, (as by experience I have found) As Plurisie, Imposthume, &c.
he resorts to divers Witches; If they know the man, he seeks to make a
difference between the Witches and the party, it may be by telling them he hath
threatned to have them very shortly searched, and so hanged for Witches; then
they all consult with Satan to save themselves, and Satan
stands ready prepared.”

The Devil’s Speech to the Witches. “What will you have me to do for you, my dear and
nearest children, covenanted and compacted with me in my hellish league, and
sealed with your blood, my delicate firebrand-darlings.”

“Oh thou (say they) that at the first didst promise to save us thy Servants
from any of our deadly Enemies discovery, and didst promise to avenge and slay
all those, we pleased, that did offend us; Murther that Wretch suddenly who
threatens the downfall of your loyal Subjects. He then promiseth to effect it:
Next news is heard, the party is dead; he comes to the Witch, and gets a world
of reverence, credence, and respect for his power and activeness, when and
indeed the Disease kills the party, not the Witch, nor the Devil, (only the
Devil knew that such a Disease was predominant) and the Witch aggravates her
damnation by her familiarity and consent to the Devil, and so comes likewise in
compass of the Laws. This is Satans usual impostring and deluding, but
not his constant course of proceeding, for He and the Witch do mischief too
much.”

Dunton’s judge has no hesitation in passing sentence; and Dunton (who earlier in the same work denounced 'Judge Implacable' so resoundingly, seems to
invent a new mode of appropriate execution for convicted witches “The Judge passes Sentence upon the Witches.And so the Judge past Sentence upon them all,
which Sentence was this: Viz.YouVinegar-Tom,
Holt, old Hag, with your four Imps, &c. shall return from the
place whence you came, and from thence he dragged upon an Hurlde to the
chiefest Street in Utopia, there to be buried alive in the mid-day,
that all may see your sin and folly, and fly for ever, the first thought that
ever shall dare to enter into their minds of making Contracts with a deceitful
Devil.”

Monday, June 04, 2012

My image
comes from the church at Wing in Buckinghamshire. This church is famous for the
Dormer tombs, which are indeed spectacular. But the gentry commemorated
themselves in more or less every parish church: this wall brass commemorates
Thomas Cotes, whose life was spent as porter at the nearby Ascott House: ‘Set
up at the apoyntment and charges of his frend Geo Houghton’. He died on November 20th, 1648.

Cotes is
depicted at the moment of leaving his life-long office behind: he extends his
hands towards heaven, and we can imagine that he is seeing the divine light.
Falling from him are the markers of his purely temporal role: his beaver hat
(which gave him status and warmth), the great key to Ascott Hall, and his
staff. At Spenser’s Bower of Bliss, the false genius as porter holds a staff
‘in hand for more formalitee’. But that’s at a place without any proper
restraints; it’s always a bad sign in Spenser if simply anyone can get past the
porter, as is the case with ‘Malvenu’, the porter at the House of Pride ‘who
entrance none denied’. A proper porter’s duties obviously involved regulating
entry into the house, but he would also have been in charge of throwing people
out – the drunk, the unruly, anyone who had been or threatened to be offensive
– so the porter’s staff is sturdy and long, a super-truncheon. There is a faint
piquancy about an image of a man who regulated entry depicted at the instant of
admission into the most exclusive premises of all.

I will
transcribe the verses:

Honest old
Thomas Cotes, that sometime was

Porter at
Ascott=Hall, hath now (alas)

Left his key,
lodg, fyre, friends and all to have

A roome in
heaven, This is that good mans grave

Reader,
prepare for thine, for none can tell

But that
you two may meete to night, Farewell.

Two further
possible nuances strike me: is there perhaps a suggestion that Cotes, so
excellent a porter, might simply slip into his old role in his new heavenly
mansion? The reader is enjoined to think that their end might come suddenly,
and that they might meet Cotes in charge of ingress at the gate of heaven.

And the
whole plaque says, in a different sense, what Cotes may well have spent his life saying: ‘I pray you,
remember the porter’.

I sought
another early modern text about porters (this little project rapidly turning
into another unwritten monograph, ‘The Porter in early modern society and
literature’), and soon found Ianitor
animae: the soules porter to cast out sinne, and to keepe out
sinne. A treatise of the feare of God. Written by William Price, Batchelour of
Divinitie, and vicar of Brigstocke in Northamptonshire(1638).

This little
treatise took its inspiration from St Bernard: “The feare of God is the porter
of the soul, that casts out sinne, and keepeth out sinne, so Bernard”, with a
side note: Ianitor animae, Bern. Thomas Watson liked the same figure: “St
Bernard calls Holy Fear Ianitor Animae, The Door-keeper of the soul’. Spenser
does not directly allegorise the Porter at the House of Temperance in the Faerie Queene II ix, who has an alarm
bell. He is of course the tongue, with his rows of warders as his assistants
the teeth, but there may be a sense that this well-regulated tongue that
excludes ‘utterers of secrets’, ‘babblers of folly’ and ‘blazers of crime’ may
in part be ‘the fear of God’, Janitor Animae.

William
Price’s treatise about the fear of God is a typical early 17th
century performance, with masses of carefully made distinctions strenuously
fighting against the essential repetitiousness of the theme. I was pleased to
see an early version of the academic gambit that says piteously that ‘hardly
anyone has written about this topic’: “though many have brief essays, yet few,
or none, have done this Royal Grace the honour, or right to allot unto it a
Compleat full treatise”.

Price wrote
in a carefully sustained plain style: “Wherein I have studied plainness to
leave the lowest capacities without excuse”, and some of the most expressive
parts of his work come when he uses a simple analogy: a Christian between flesh
and spirit “is like a peece of iron between two lode-stones”. A good person may
be shaken by a sudden terror, but should recover: Price uses the analogies of
oil gradually separating out if it has been shaken with water, and then the
needle of a shaken compass settling back on its north. The Soul standing on
Grace, Love, Joy and Hope is like “a four square stone, whichever way soever
you cast it, it falls upright”.

Only rarely
does he forget simplicity: the poor Christian might “oscitantly demeane
himself”: from the Latin for yawning, and this adverbial use is narrowly an OED
antedating over a line cited from Henry More: “Which those drowsie
Nodders over the Letter of the Scripture have very oscitantly collected.” A
delightful word, expressive of a very 17th century disapprobation
(“was not Ruffinus, as learned men observe, a very careless and
oscitant Historian?” – from a EEBO keyword search).

Price dedicated his work to a later William Cecil. Whoever
introduced Nathaniel Tucker’s Theophosoi [as EEBO adds – ‘sic’] theophiloi: God's fearers are God's
favourites, or, An encouragement to fear God in the worst times delivered in
several sermons in 1662 had clearly looked at it, but Tucker himself seems
free of plagiary.

Back in Price (to
conclude), isn’t “the filiall feare of oGd” (as the heading for Chapter 7) one of the better 17th
century misprints - and not even corrected in the corrections? The type-setter must
have been ‘oscitant’.